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The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c8: IV. Sāṃkhya and Yoga

The Sāṃkhya System: A History of the Sāṃkhya Philosophy c8

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English

IV. Sāṃkhya and Yoga

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The Yoga philosophy, according to the epic, is a system which is ancient like the Sāmkhya, and this parallel position belongs to the Yoga in the whole of its historical existence. The practises of Yoga, as they are revealed to us in the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali, the oldest text-book of the school, contain much that is in itself a relic of very primitive conceptions of the value of psychic states of profound excitement. This tendency to attribute importance to the obtaining of such states is widespread: there is a striking example for this form of belief in the history of Greek religion in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., and in the Ṛgveda itself (x, 136) there is a mention of the mad Muni, probably a predecessor of the later Yogin. It is unnecessary, therefore, to see in the Yoga practice any borrowing* from the aboriginal tribes, though we need not doubt that these tribes practised similar rites and that their influence may have tended to maintain and develop Yoga to the extraordinary popularity which it has achieved in India.

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On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that the introduction of Yoga into the practice of high philosophy was natural and proper in the case of a philosophy, which, like the Ātman doctrine, denied the possibility of knowledge of the self as subject. As the Kena Upaniṣad (ii) has it, the self cannot be known by him who has knowledge, but only by him who has no knowledge. Hence comes the effort to subdue all the activity of senses and of mind, to empty the intellect and thus to make it ready for a new apprehension, the normal aim of the mystic of all lands and places. It is to this theoretic aim that Deussen* ascribes the origin of the practice, but it is clear that in adopting the Yoga practices for this purpose the holders of the Ātman faith were not innovators, but were turning existing material to a more refined and speculative use.

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∗ Suggested by A. E. Gough, Philosophy of the Upaniṣads, pp. 18, 19; Garbe, Sāmkhya Philosophie, pp. 185, 186.

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The development of the Yoga theory is first clearly revealed in the same Upaniṣads as deal with those doctrines which later are adopted as part of the Sāṃkhya system that is, of the older Upaniṣads, the Katha and Śvetāśvatara,, and later by far the Maitrāyaṇī. In the conception of Yoga, literally yoking, there seems to be an almost necessary,† or at least normal, reference to a fixing of the mind on God. The use of Yoga is, however, as well adapted to the case of the believer in the absolute Brahman as to the devotee of an individual deity: the former stage is presented in the Katha and Maitrāyaṇī, the latter in the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad. The term in its technical sense also occurs in these Upaniṣads, and when opposed to Sāṃkhya it denotes doubtless the practical side of religious concentration as opposed to the theoretical investigation. It follows necessarily from this very contrast, and from the nature of the case, that Yoga could not primarily be a separate system of philosophy, and hence its natural dependence on other systems.

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† As held by Rājendralāla Mitra, *Yoga Aphorisms*, p. xii; P. Oltramare, *L'histoire des Idées Théosophiques*, i, 308-310. Garbe denies this explanation. Tuxen (*Yoga*, p. 32) accepts Vyāsa's rendering as Samādhi; Charpentier (*Z.D.M.G.*, lxv, 47) takes it as Praxis.

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In the epic the relation of Sāṃkhya and Yoga is precisely as in the Upaniṣads: the two stand side by side as philosophy and religion, as theory and practice, and some details of the Yoga practise, as given, show how much the system had advanced in the direction in which it appears in the Yoga Sūtra. But there appears a distinct tendency to ascribe to the Yoga, as opposed to the Sāṃkhya, a twenty-sixth principle, a perfectly enlightened spirit with which the individual spirit is really identical. The Sāṃkhya is resolutely without an Īśvara, but the Yoga has an Īśvara, who is identified with Brahman, who is here a supreme spirit into which the individual spirit is resolved, having been in essence a part of the absolute spirit which multiplied itself. The end of Yoga is in accordance with this view, the vision of the one true self (vi, 30, 10, 12; xiv, 19, 17-19), but it is also represented in more accurate agreement with the Sāṃkhya in its atheistic form as an isolation of the spirit from matter (xii, 306, 16, 17; 316, 14ff). From the former point of view it is not difficult to see the development of the meaning of devotion to God, which it often has in the *Bhagavadgītā*, or the further sense in that text, especially in chapters three and five, of action without hope of reward or desire of reward.

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∗ *Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie*, I, iii, 507.

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The theory has often been held that Yoga was first atheistic, and that the theism of the classical system of the Yoga Sūtra and of the epic alike is due to a concession to popular feeling, nor is there any doubt whatever that in the Sūtra the connection of the divinity with the system is really a loose one.∗ But the theory that there was an earlier atheistic Yoga as a philosophical system is clearly not made probable by the evidence of the epic, which shows the Yoga as clearly distinguished from the Sāṃkhya by its twenty-sixth principle, though it ever tries to assimilate the Sāṃkhya to the Yoga, and both to the doctrine of the Brahman. It is, therefore, perfectly possible that the position of the classical Yoga is due to its close association with the Sāṃkhya, which has accentuated its real indifference to the idea of a deity, which is certainly not philosophically, though perhaps historically, essential to the conception of Yoga.

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∗ See P. Tuxen, *Yoga* (Copenhagen, 1911), pp. 56ff.

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Now great importance attaches to the date of the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali, in view of the fact that if it could be placed in the second century B.C., there would be attained a very definite date for the growth of the Sāṃkhya school with which in all essentials except atheism the Yoga agrees. Unfortunately, this view rests only on the theory that Patañjali is the same as the author of the *Mahābhāṣya*, whose date is now usually admitted to be the middle of the second century B.C. This view, however, cannot stand examination. It is clear that in his philosophic views as to the nature of substance and quality, the grammarian stands on a lower plane of development than the philosopher, and on the other hand the philosopher violates one at least of the grammarian's laws of grammar. Further, the Sūtra contains some doctrines which are probably late borrowings: thus in i, 40 the theory of atoms which belongs to the Vaiśeṣika is clearly referred to, nor less clearly in iii, 52 is the doctrine of the Buddhist Sautrāntika school that time consists of moments, Kṣaṇas, which are themselves forms of development of ever restless nature. This doctrine is found also in the Vaiśeṣika school, as it accords with the Atomic theory, but not until the Praśastapādabhāṣya. It is less certain if we can attribute to the Sūtra the doctrines of Sphoṭa, which belonged to the school of grammarians, and which is supposed by the commentator, Vyāsa, to be referred to in iii, 17, or that of the infinite size of the inner organ, which is seen by him in iv, 10, and which is supposed by Jacobi* to have been borrowed from the Vaiśeṣika school, in opposition to the view that this organ was of mean size, which is asserted by Vijñānabhikṣu to have been the view of the Sāṃkhya school, though this has been questioned.† More decisive is, perhaps, the fact that the Yoga Sūtra seems to attack the doctrine of the Vijñānavādins, and that therefore it is probably not older than the third century A.D., and probably is younger. The great supporters of that school, Vasubandhu and Asaṅga, lived in all probability about A.D. 300, but the school itself may, of course, have existed earlier, so that no absolutely certain result can be attained. It is, however, not at all unlikely that the production of the Yoga Sūtra was more or less directly motived by the revival of the Sāṃkhya and its definite setting out in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa, who was an earlier contemporary, according to Chinese evidence, of Vasubandhu. The attack on the idealism of Vasubandhu thus found in the Yoga Sūtra would be extremely natural.

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∗ J.A.O.S., xxxi, 28. † J. Charpentier, Z.D.M.G., lxv, 848; Tuxen, Yoga, p. 101.

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It may be added that no further light on the date of either Sāmkhya or Yoga can be gained from a notice in the Kauṭilya Arthaśāstra,* which ranks as Ānvīkṣikī, logical sciences, the views of the Lokāyata, the Sāmkhya and the Yoga schools. This enumeration, if it could be established that the work of Kauṭilya was really a work of the beginning of the third century B.C., would not indeed carry the question much beyond the evidence afforded by the epic, but it would afford a more secure basis for considering the value of the epic data, but unfortunately the date of the Arthaśāstra is very uncertain, and may be very much later than the suggested date.† It might possibly be thought that the combination of Sāmkhya and Yoga with the certainly atheistic Lokāyata would permit the conclusion that the Yoga was at one period atheistic, but there seems no possible ground to insist on reading such an implication into the terms, while it may be observed that the Lokāyata can only be called Ānvīkṣikī by a stretch of the imagination, since its first characteristic is its resolute dogmatic refusal to acknowledge the existence of any means of proof save perception.

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∗ See H. Jacobi, Sitz. der K. Preuss. Akad. der Wiss., 1911, pp. 732-743; followed by Charpentier Z.D.M.G., lxv, 844, n. 1. † Keith, J.R.A.S., 1916, pp. 130-7; Jolly, Z.D.M.G., lxviii, 355-9.

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